George Orwell reviews Mein Kampf

Found on Twitter: Cory Doctorow posted a review of Mein Kampf by George Orwell. The date is given as March 1940 - which is to say, about six months after the invasion of Poland,  perhaps two before the invasion of France, during a period called the "Phoney War." While Hitler is recognized as the enemy of Britain, the review is almost matter-of-fact in tone, even when describing how Hitler's plans and philosophy appealed to the millions of (formerly) unemployed Germans.

For the purpose here, though, what's unexpected is how current it sounds. For example:

The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. 

Or perhaps this assessment of the gap between progressive goals and human reality:

... [human beings] also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. 

Other similarities are left as an exercise for the reader. Even if we aren't quite there yet, echoes are in the wind.

Capitol Investment

Here's a picture of the U.S. Capitol dome currently:

Here's one from 1861 - Lincoln's inauguration in March:

Crisis is a time for investment of all sorts, a time to repair and handle problems long put off. And here it is again.  Evidently there has been some significant damage to the dome since the last major restoration 55 years ago.

Although you have to think that the South should have seen that - a major addition to the existing government buildings for aesthetic reasons despite the pending conflict - and reconsidered secession...

Lana del Rabbit

Listening to Lana del Rey the other day, the idea that she was a Civic torch singer reminded me of Mrs. Jessica Rabbit.  Had anyone else thought of that idea? Well, yes - and fairly recently, at that.

Jessica Rabbit is the unexpectedly sultry wife of Roger Rabbit, in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The movie is set in 1947, just after World War II. In addition to the persecution of Toons, it relies on post-war corruption as part of the tale.  Although her age is not precisely given, she appears to be in her 20s - perhaps early 30s -  which would have her born around or soon after 1917 - a solid Civic herself.

(Although, as a color Toon, she must be younger than Betty Boop, of course...)

In any case, Lana del Rey has been covering the Peggy Lee tune that Jessica Rabbit sang quite memorably. And she's been dressing up like her, as well.

Don's Monitor Top

Watching Singing in the Rain the other day and noticed that Gene Kelly's character, Don Lockwood, has a Monitor Top refrigerator in his kitchen. Which didn't seem anachronistic, necessarily, but didn't seem right, either.

Well, it's fine:As that earlier post noted, they were in production starting in 1925, a couple of years before The Jazz Singer came out.

Happyish Curmudgeons

I'm working on a separate blog with a goal to focus on stories - film, television, literature - and how it changes through the Saeculum.  And as such, this article about a new series, Happyish, would be a great fit with it. However, it kept hitting so many Crisis touchpoints that it seems worthwhile to list them here, anyway:

• "A curmudgeon creates a curmudgeon" and Xers are the new curmudgeons, like other Reactive/Nomad generations.
• The idea that the change to this current turning is very much starting to creep into how people view the world, as the lead character tries to understand his Millennial co-workers and their different perspectives on life.
• The character's name is Thom Payne, and references to Common Sense are called out in the article and presumably on the show as well.
• The ads juxtapose a standard-for-advertising happy family with a mushroom cloud. And really, isn't that how life feels right now?

Unfortunately, initial critical response appears to be negative.

Boyhood

In the film Boyhood, there can be a tendency to view the product closeups as being intentionally shown to indicate a point in time - Game Boys and Halo on Xbox and iPods and iPhones.  Usually, of course, that's just what such things are - and indeed, in this case they are again. The twist is that the shots had to be set up when those products were actually being used, because the film was done over the course of 12 years. There was no need to go back and find those products so they could be included: The shots were done then and there, or they were not. Similarly, nobody had to craft how Ethan Hawke's Dad was railing against Bush and Iraq and McCain so that it sounded as if it fit in that time: It already would have, because nobody would have known a different way to talk about them.

It makes the film its own special kind of time capsule, showing how the world changed over a specific decade. In this way it's similar to The Best Years of Our Lives. That film came out right after World War II ended, and can't have shown how folks viewed the war upon further reflection. It had to show attitudes that were already prevalent. Nobody was going to come from the future and tell the filmmakers about the Cold War or McCarthy or revisionism in Japan. Or, for that matter, about how people 70 years later might see the ubiquitous smoking as an indicator of the time period, rather than just What People Did at that time.

The First Clash

Finished reading The First Clash by Jim Lacey today, a history of the battle of Marathon. As the author notes early on, people know Thermopylae better lately because of the movie 300...and maybe because 300 vs. 300,000 is cooler than 10000 vs. 60000. (Rough numbers, all around - I don't feel the need to get exact about them, since for every one - except the 300 Spartans - nobody else seems 100% sure either.)

He makes the good point that, without Marathon, Thermopylae wouldn't have happened. Athens gets taken over, all the other city-states submit to Persia, Sparta holds out for a while... but the best case there is a glorious but decisive defeat. By showing that the Persians were not invincible - not by a long shot - the Greeks had some expectation that a battle held the possibility of victory.

This appears, of course, to be a Crisis period, at least for the Greeks. It's not clear whether Thermopylae 10 years later is the final culmination of the Crisis, or if it was a relatively minor issue
 to the Greeks, so indicating that this was more of a First Turning war than a Peak Crisis one.  At the least, though, Lacey refers to the men at Marathon as a "Greatest Generation" indicating that, whatever side of the Crisis they were on, those who were there were the Heroes of their day.